


Help

by tenpointstohufflepuff (MsBinns)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Sort of Happy, The Devil Complex, post 5x14, post-episode, promising at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 07:45:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14100687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsBinns/pseuds/tenpointstohufflepuff
Summary: She’s not here to convince him he’s a good man. Not yet. She’s not here to debate the morality of what he’s done either.  She just wants him to admit he needs help.My attempt to cope with the horrors of 5x14.





	Help

She comes down to see him twice in the next 24 hours, but he is sleeping both times. Or maybe he’s just resting and ignoring her. Either way, when she walks down, his back is turned and she can’t make herself force another conversation. 

He’s doing push-ups when she comes down the third time. 

She’s armed with a cup of tea and the comfort that her progeny - their progeny - has hammered into her that they will fix this together like they always have. So she’s here to try.

“That’s new,” she remarks, seeing him pump out the push-ups at a furious pace.

He brings his legs beneath him quickly in one fluid motion and hops to his feet.

“Not really,” he speaks brusquely. “I did it all the time in prison.”

The words are a jarring reminder to the six months of his life they’ve barely talked about these last few weeks.

“Right.” She tries not to let the guilt wash over her this early in the conversation. He’d been suffering for months and she can’t help but feel an overwhelming guilt that as his partner, his wife, the person who knows him better than he knows himself, she hadn’t seen it. “I brought you some tea,” she forces the words out.

“Thanks.” He wipes his hands on his trousers and walks toward the glass. “Does that mean you’re coming in?” He holds her gaze briefly and then immediately casts his eyes downward. “Or are you still afraid of me like the others?”

“They’re not afraid,” she assures much too quickly, knowing he sees right through it. “I’m not afraid.”

“So you’re coming in?” She feels the briefest flash of concern at how much he seems to want her to come inside, remembering clearly the machinations and traps he’d laid out not two days ago to carry out his plan. The concern passes as quickly as it came. That hadn’t been her Fitz. It wasn’t Fitz. She’s told herself it countless times since everything happened, but each time the assurance leaves her feeling hollow. It had been him. He had been eager to remind her of that last time she’d seen him. She knows there’s only one way to find out if that’s completely true or not. 

“Yes.” She plugs the code in to open the door, hardly believing she has to do this to go see her husband. 

He takes the tea from her hands delicately, like he’s afraid to startle her somehow if he does it too quickly.

He looks so broken she wants to do nothing but wrap him a hug. His hair is wid and looks as if he’s been tearing at it, his eyes are bloodshot with dark circles beneath them, and she can see blood on his hands from where she assumes he’s been punching the walls. 

“How are you feeling?” she asks tentatively.

“M’fine,” he dismisses and turns from her to go sit on the bed. “I’m not seeing him if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not, but that’s...good.” She hates walking on eggshells around him. This is her Fitz. The man she married barely a week ago. The man she wants to have a family with. She feels a wave of - is it nausea again? - rise up in her as she thinks about what Deke had revealed to her. The man she will have a family with.

“Why are you here?” he asks brusquely, still unable to look at her.

“Because I miss you,” she admits plainly. “Because I’m worried about you. Do I have to have a reason to see my husband?” 

“When your husband betrays the…” He pauses for a moment like he has to reach inside himself to pull the words out. It reminds her almost of how he’d spoken in the initial months after his recovery from the pod. “T- trust of everyone on his team and t - t - tortures them, yeah..” She can hear the self-loathing in his voice.

“You did what had to be done.”

“Stop trying to rationalize it, Jemma,” he snaps. “It doesn’t help.”

“Well, what can I do to help?” she presses, daring to walk closer to him, but he just shrugs helplessly and turns from her.

“There’s nothing.” His voice sounds defeated. “Just leave me down here.”

\-----------------------------------

She goes down twice more in the next two days to visit the broken shell of a man that used tobe her husband. She can’t bear the thought of him being alone that long, but each time she visits him he resists any attempt she makes at conversation. He insists he’s a monster who deserves to be locked up. She doesn’t know how to reason with him. The rest of her team seems to agree with him. Deke has been the only one willing to bring food down to him. He’s stayed close to Jemma these past four days. So much so that she knows the others are starting to grow suspicious about the way she so frequently comes and goes from his room. They haven’t had a conversation about it since he’d first revealed his connection to her. It’s all too much to comprehend and, frankly, she doesn’t want to try to without Fitz. She asks if Fitz talks to him when he brings his meals. Deke says he’s tried to initiate conversation, asking if there’s anything he can bring Fitz, but he hasn’t said a word. 

“He looks rough,” Deke admits. “Think he’s been punching the walls again. His hands are all messed up.” 

Jemma lets out a pained whimper at the thought. For all the times they’ve forcibly been apart this voluntary separation is worse than anything they’ve endured. There’s no problem to solve. Nothing tangible to fix. There’s nothing she can do for him if he doesn’t want her help. And he’s made it painfully clear the last two days that he doesn’t.

Still she uses Deke’s admission about his hands as pretext to visit him again and see if his state of mind is any better. She fears that the longer he’s alone the worse it will get.

Armed with a medical kit and a steely resolve not to let him push her away, she returns back down the stairs she has come to dread.

He’s lying on the bed like always, curled into the fetal position with his hands over his head. It looks almost like he’s trying to block something out and she fears the worst when she unlocks the door, enters the cell and calls his name. Her voice is filled with an uncertainty she wished she could mask better. She wonders when being around him will feel natural again.

“What you doing here?” She’s grown used to his abrupt inquiries and knows an equally short dismissal is likely to follow.

“Deke said you might need medical attention.” She holds out the supplies and walks toward him.

“M’fine.”

She cranes her head to see the bloody circles that have formed across the already inflamed knuckles on his right hand. 

“Does your head hurt?” she inquires, motioning to his pillow and the way he’d just been resting. 

“No.” The guilty expression on his face is as much of an admission as she knows she’ll probably get from him. Rather than say anything, she gently takes his hand then to clean the raw sores. It’s the first physical contact they’ve had in days and she’s pleased he doesn’t withdraw.

“Is he down here with you?” she finally asks.

“He is me, Jemma.” She blows out a breath as she wraps the gauze around his hand, knowing they’re about to go around this again. He is committed to the interpretation that this had all been his doing and he is deserving of this solitary confinement. She refuses to believe that’s all there is to the narrative. 

“Yes, but you were hallucinating him too,” she reminds softly. “Having full-fledged conversations with a person who was not there.” Fitz yanks his hand away.

“He is there! Because he’s - “

“You. Yes. I understand. He is inside you.” She’s tried to read as much as she can on clinical psychology to try to understand what’s happened to the man she loves. She wants to understand what he’s suffering from, but their resources are limited and she knows next to nothing about the nature of the voice that he hears because he refuses to talk to her about it. 

“No, he is me,” Fitz challenges. “It’s me that did it, do you not get that?” This time when his voice takes on a sharp tone she dares to snap back. She refuses to leave him down here like this another day.

“He’s not you.”

“He is. And if you can’t accept that then - then I don’t know why you’re down here.” She gets what he’s doing, why he’s pushing her away, but she refuses to let him. He’s been there for her every time she’s ever needed help of any kind. Somehow this is harder than any problem they’d ever faced at the Academy, SciOps, or in all the insanity the last four years. So she says the words that he seems to want to hear her say, even if she doesn’t completely believe them.

“He is you.” She wants to tell him he’s also a good man with a wonderful heart who she still loves deeply despite all that’s happened, but she can sense he’s not ready to hear those things yet. He wants to hear her acknowledge the truth. That there is a part of him capable of things she doesn’t want to admit. Even though she remembers the look of confusion on his face as it dawned on him that this had all been him. More vividly, she recalls with perfect clarity the way he’d rejected her overtures, allowed a gun to be trained on her, and continued cutting into their best friend. “That’s why I want to help you.”

“You can’t fix me, Jemma.” 

“I know, but you can,” she states confidently. When he doesn’t open his mouth to offer an immediate rebuttal, she continues. “I just need you to - to admit it wasn’t all you. That there - there’s an apparition - a voice inside your head that manifests when you’re...” She struggles for the right words to try to explain what she can only guess at, but he speaks before she can finish.

“He’s not around when you are.” He admits the words so softly she barely hears him. “It’s why I thought...why I thought I could - when we were - I thought I - ” She thinks his stammering is an attempt to explain why he’d lied to her about how long this has been in his head, why he’d agreed to marry her despite this dark secret, but she doesn’t press him about it. She supposes deep down she’d known he wasn’t all right. That he couldn’t possibly be after all he’d been through. But that’s another conversation. Right now all she needs him to do is admit it’s not all his fault. That whatever rationale had made him carry out his plan there was something else very wrong with him too. Something that can’t be explained by his simplistic arguments that that’s simply who he is now.

“So you only hear him when you’re alone?” The horrible suspicion she’d felt the last four days that he hadn’t been truly alone those six months in solitary makes her chest tighten. She shudders to think about the toxic thoughts that had played through his mind while separated from everybody he loved and the government breathing down his neck for answers and results.

“Yeah. Mostly.” His sad one word responses break her heart only because she can hear the shame in his voice for something that she knows is beyond his control.

She finally settles next to him on the bed, hoping he won’t recoil. When he doesn’t she presses further. “Can you tell me...what he says?”

He just shrugs in response and she thinks he’s not going to say anything, but he scratches at his chin then. She can see the shameful look in his eyes return before he speaks.

“Bit like my father.”

And Jemma’s heart breaks all over again for what feels like the millionth time in the last few days. It makes sense. The memories - no the person - that had come out of the Framework with him had been guided and shaped by Alistair Fitz. His father had made his son cold and calculating, able to solve any problem by any means necessary without the slightest pang of remorse.

“What happens if you ignore him?” she inquires softly, assuming if the voice in his head is anything like his father then the response is nothing but Fitz’s own worst thoughts about himself. She feels a lump in her throat thinking about those thoughts eating away at Fitz for months with nobody to talk to but Hale’s interrogators. “Please, Fitz, you have to talk to me.” She tries to speak calmly and slowly. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“We’ve all been through a lot,” he sniffles then and she knows now, though she’s seen him cry in front of her countless times before, why he refuses to look at her. “I’m the only one that - “

“Don’t.” Jemma stops him before he can say it. “You’re not weak.” He doesn’t respond for a long time. “You are the strongest and bravest man I know.” His sniffling turns into a sudden scowl like she suspected it might at the supportive words. “And you have been through more than anybody ever should.” The scowl grows larger. She knows it’s the exact opposite of what he wants to hear. She’s not here to convince him he’s a good man though. Not yet. She’s not here to debate the morality of what he’s done either. She just wants him to admit he needs help. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, Fitz.” Her voice breaks and she sucks in a breath quickly, trying to compose herself. “And I can’t if you don’t talk to me.”

They sit in silence then for a long time. Neither looks at each other. He plays with his wedding band and she fears, like she does every time she comes down here, that at any moment he will take it off his finger. Minutes pass that feel like hours. This visit is, by far the longest, they’ve shared since everything happened. They’ve made progress. She’s learned a few small tidbits about the voice he has been hearing for months. 

She shifts slightly, about to get to her feet and depart, not wanting to push too much in one day, when her husband reaches out for her. He moves his hand atop the hand she has resting on her thigh and gives a squeeze. And for the first time since speaking to Deke, she’s filled with hope. He has a long road ahead. They both do, without even considering all that awaits them outside this cell. Each time she goes to visit him, opens her mouth to defend him, her teammates grow a bit colder to her. She and Deke get more isolated from the rest of the team every day for their refusal to give up on him. 

Feeling his hand over hers, she feels a wave of certainty that they will come out of this stronger, with or without the team. Because it reminds her of the moment their fingers had grasped each other the first time on Maveth. Or the moment she’d rested her head on his lap her first night back. Even the moment he’d collapsed into her arms for the first time in the Lighthouse. She’d known each time that no matter what happened, as long as they were together, they could face whatever daunting challenge the future held. 

And this is progress, his hand atop hers. He’s not saving her. He’s not offering her any kind of promise. He’s simply asking her to stay. It’s been five days and six hours since his self-imposed exile began, but she knows now, without saying a word, they will be okay. 

He’s finally asking for help.


End file.
